


Turn Up Light and Sound

by stateofintegrity



Category: Rush (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 16:46:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 6,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5673193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Geddy narrates the subtext of Exit Stage Left</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Track One: A Long Awaited Friend

 

 

As we walk down the hallway from dressing room to the stage, I notice the way his white shirt sticks to the back of his neck. He’s taken to taking cold showers before we go on, says they cool him up there under the lights. What it does to me, standing there in our dressing room, knowing he’s naked under the cool spray… well, it’s enough to make me need a cold shower too! Unfortunately, I don’t think Alex would welcome the intrusion… no matter how I sweetened the deal.

We walk out side by side and I can feel my entire body light up from his nearness, even with his silly red shoes and ultra thin tie. As we round a corner, he jostles me gently, silently asking if I’ve got this, if I’m okay. I _will_ be, once we’re up there in the eye of the storm with the concert whirling out of control around us. At least, I’ll be as okay any twenty-eight year old man in love with his best friend and bandmate can be, even as I watch said bandmate cavort and shine and entrance an audience of thousands…

He stops me just before we go onstage, places his huge hands on my shoulders. “I know recording nights make you nervous,” he says, his voice as mellow and full as a harvest moon. “If you start panicking yourself, look at me. I’ve got your back up there, just like always.”

I want to stay just like this, his blue eyes looking into mine, his warm hands holding me up. “O-o-okay,” I manage shakily – and then we’re on.

 

Though the opening number is “Limelight,” he’s bathed in blue lights for the first part of the song, his hair silvered by them. As the song churns around us I see him making faces to go with his guitar part, his hair sparking under the lights. Dappled in pinks and purples, I sing just for him, wishing just this once that he’d see, that I could get to him somehow, touch his heart. The lights go up behind me and I shiver at being singled out in strong light. Eyes as wide as life is deep, I search for him and see that he’s already sweating, already giving himself to the music. From watching him perform so many times, I know how he’d perform with me. I even know the faces he’d make above me as he claimed my body; I know they’d look like the ones he makes when he plays a solo.

I shouldn’t be thinking like this so early; I’ll unravel too fast and that will lead to an embarrassing and messy conclusion – me jerking myself off unceremoniously in the dressing room shower, water carrying my love and my shame down the drain. But then, he’s not helping!

As I sing “fish-eye lens,” he goes to his knees and I want to thread my fingers in the fringe of his golden hair, to feel his long legs wrap around my hips. Of course, I’d need a knife to get him out of those jeans… Damn that guitar of his, hiding everything those jeans were made to reveal. Since this is all I’ve ever going to get, shouldn’t I at least get all of it?

His solo – perhaps the most magical of all of his solos – hits me in the heart like a golden barb and I fear that if he keeps playing, those golden threads will draw it right out of my chest and show it to every uplifted face in the crowd. But then he begins arpeggiating, and it’s my groin that tingles, filled with golden buzzing. How many more songs can I endure? How many more _shows_?

I find myself jealous of the camera as he jokes and jumps and charms it. But then he’s at my elbow, teasing, trying to draw me out and I regret being song-tethered, having to sing. But the moment comes – the moment I wait for during every show. We’re at the center of the stage, bent toward one another, me playing almost _against_ him, the two of us playing _for_ each other. As the song ends, he takes a knee and I try to keep my feet.


	2. Track 2: Love and Life Are Deep

Track Two: Love and Life Are Deep

I lower my head, singing, “high on you,” and meaning him. Just the sight of him with a guitar in his hands is enough to set every nerve end in my body sparkling, sparking. “Tom Sawyer,” is far from his favorite song; he feels like the keys don’t leave him enough room in the song. I’m not even sure where in the song we are. I’m thinking of what it would be like to slip that stupid red jacket off of his shoulders, to bind his hands with that silly yellow tie. While he makes love to the crowd through his solo, I walk back to visit with Neil. Even through the fury of his drumming, he shoots me a too-knowing look, brandywine eyes telling me to be careful.  
“Changes aren’t permanent,” I cry out over the roar of our fans. I need a change – and now.   
But it’s the same old tableau: the two of us in the center of the stage, back to back, his bobbing hips teasing me and him so oblivious with his golden hair flying around his face. His mouth is wide open, wide enough for anything I could give, and he’s given over to the music. As the song ends, he fingers my bass strings and I jangle the chords of his guitar and I swallow hard at imagining him stroking me off.


	3. Track 3: Longing for Sunlight

Track Three: Longing for Sunlight

           

            Now it’s time to introduce him on the classical guitar. Screw unrest in the forest – there’s unrest _in me. In my heart._ Hell, I’m like the damn maples, longing for the sunlight that’s him. I want him beside me, over me, in me… but all I can do is give his ass an appreciative look before I break into the song.

            He has me wide-eyed and jazzed up, hovering just over my shoulder, too close but entirely too far away. An artificial twilight descends over us, painting him like a masterpiece in monochrome. I sing along to his playing somehow, singing just for him as I always have as I abuse the strings of my bass.

            I don’t know how to look sexy for him, but I try to imitate his natural eroticism, turning and hopping and gyrating, lights flashing off of his guitar and my bass. His mouth goes wide for a moment, as if someone like me could actually have an effect on him. Just before the maples form a union, he shoots me a look that’s almost smoldering, but it’s over too quick and he turns to Neil, maybe to get himself together. Maybe he could give me some pointers.


	4. Track 4: To break my fast on honeydew

Track Four: To Break My Fast on Honeydew

Mist rises around us, transporting us to some lost Shangri-la. The only pleasure domes I know of are his eyes; I could swim in those warm, blue currents forever. He has his doubleneck now and I bite back on a whimper of need. Neil’ s chimes ring out behind me and I feel called, drawn by how beautiful he is with a rosy waterfall of smoke cascading over his shoulders. But Alex doesn’t see anything, communing with something beyond what we’re doing here under the lights and before the cameras. See me, I cry with my voice and my bass notes. I’ve been saying it for my entire life.   
Suddenly the lights come up, as if in answer. He comes to me, double neck guitar meeting double neck bass. I bump into him, jockeying for position in this strange dance that we do. He reaches out and touches my shoulder, a friend’s touch. I shiver at his touch, but then he’s snuggling into my hair. I feel frozen in an everlasting daze, wanting to explore the landscape of his eyes. He contentedly plays the outro and I wish he would give me more than laughter, more than a friend’s smile. I want him to do to me what he’s doing to that doubleneck. Is the fate of Neil’s immortal character worse than my eternal unrequited love?


	5. Track 5: Excitement shivers up and down my spine

Track Five: Excitement Shivers Up and Down My Spine

Because you don’t love him, you can’t know the magic in his long fingers, his ability to cast a spell by playing a few notes… but I do, and can, and brace myself for the gentle sounds that will enter through my ears and take captive my heart. “Song about a car,” I announce unenthusiastically. Since I’m not in the backseat of one with him, I’d rather just skip the seven minute mini epic. But then he leans toward me as I begin to sing and I have to answer him the way I always have, giving him my voice because I doubt he’d accept anything else. 

As the car graphic morphs behind me I wish I could enter it, dissolve into the shining red sports car and be taken away. Instead, I sing, tossing my hair in a tell-tale nervous gesture. We’re on film- being filmed! – and all I can think about is him. I watch as blue lights – now pink, now purple – change the color of his silly red suit and I mentally count down to the place where the song will break, will let me move from the microphone toward him. When that moment comes his eyes meet mine across the stage and he comes to my side, a dream with the rainbow lights in his honeyed hair. He dances for me, guitar swinging to the right and then the left, for a moment before I have to be back at the microphone and his playfulness eases the need in me, the pain.   
Then he’s off being a Lerxst, strutting and dancing and being silly, making ridiculous open-mouthed faces that supposedly match the music he’s playing. When he begins to rock emphatically back and forth, bending at the waist, I almost lose my voice completely. His hair has gone soft and flyaway around his face and it’s easy for me to let the stage world dissolve, easy for me to imagine myself bent over while he rocks like that above me… in me. I wish I believed in something higher. I’d ask its forgiveness for being such a terrible best friend. But is it wrong to notice he’s beautiful? To want to belong to something so beautiful that it threatens to tear your voice out of your throat? 

I turn away as we’re hit with a wash of gold-green light; behind me I know that Pratt is tossing and catching a stick. He’s as likely to miss as I am to get to Alex to fall in love with me. Heart-sore, I try to play my part, wondering all the while if anyone can see past my mask. I smile as I sing (the best I can, anyway) and make those signature rock star moves of jerking backward, bass lifting into my hands. In one of those moments it occurs to me that the cameras really shouldn’t matter to someone like me. Aren’t I always performing? Always pretending not to be in love with him? 

We’re in the fast-paced “driving down the road” part of the song now, with cheesy road graphics on the screen behind us. The vocals here are punctuated by guitar and drums and I stretch myself to really hammer them out. His solo rises up out of nowhere, a golden tunnel of light, and the sweet, bright notes make me want to just sink to the ground. Notes like that are Alex. They’re like sugar and sunlight, but edgy too… they remind me of his laughter. They’re a golden kite torn out of my hands, yellow fabric stretched across sky the color of his eyes. Notes like that… they’re the sound of everything I’ll never hold in my hands. My gentle torturer… he doesn’t know how he hurts me when he plays so well. 

White light now, and he faces me, rocks toward me with his fingers blurring on the strings. I can’t help but think of the way his hips must look beneath those pants, snapping forward, of the rounded bulge his guitar hides. For years, reporters have been writing about his beauty, but no one mentions the raw sexuality of his stage performances. Sweat pearling underneath my mop of hair, I wonder why. When we find ourselves centerstage again, he’s kicking up a red boot and I laugh, until he kneels at my side. I don’t even have to tell you what kind of thoughts a kneeling Alex conjures in me… I’m just happy my fingers remember the notes, because my brain is vacationing in paradise. (That it’s a paradise I’ll never see isn’t something I dwell on, not now, with the heat coming off of his body, with him playing right beside me.) To save myself, I spin away, sling my bass lower, and return to my lonely post at the microphone just before his final ending notes sound out.


	6. Track 6: To Dance on the Strings

Track Six: To Dance on the Strings

We launch into Freewill and the place seems to explode. This is a taxing song for me, so I start out sweet and mellow, trying to save my voice for the high parts. If Lerxst would come over here and stroke me, just once, I know I could hit any note in the stratosphere. I wish it was enough to play here at his side, to sing songs for his band, for him.  
I watch him stride on long legs, long hair billowing back. The guide I’ve chosen is him – he lights my life and I follow the golden gleam of him. I move with him even when I don’t realize it and it makes me smile. I get fancy on this song, whirling and kicking as he solos. He jams near and we bob back and forth together. I imagine doing it without the guitars between us and almost can’t sing the high notes because I almost can’t breathe.  
It’s a relief to drop into my regular register and I happily return to the chorus. He looks to me to end things and lets me play the last note – a gift.  
When the lights go down for one brief moment, he nuzzles the side of my neck and I’m flushing all the way into Closer to the Heart. There’s no question who is in mine.


	7. Track 7: You can be the Captain

Track Seven: You Can be the Captain

He plays against a landscape of artificial stars, bathed in plum-colored lights. Out before us, the audience creates its own galaxy of lighter flames, lifted in salute to his hands on the strings. I wish, absurdly, that I could stand among them and lift up a light to all that’s golden about my best friend – his heart, the shine of his smile. All I can lift are my eyes and I stare at him with his classical guitar with a lump in my throat; for a moment, I feel like everything he is turns toward me and his notes chime inside of me. Worn with performing, I realize what’s happening. My secret is slipping away from me; after a night like this one, I won’t be able to not tell him.

  
The lights vanish completely, to rise just behind Neil and my body carries my trembling spirit nearer to him. In the darkness, I can’t read him for signs of welcome, for signs of anything, but I can feel the heat of his long, lean body and I close my eyes and let it be enough. Neil cracks his sticks down on his cymbals and the lights flare and Alex moves away from me, being silly as always, stretching his arm out over his head in what’s become one of his goofy, signature moves. I laugh in spite of myself. Leave it to Lerxst to drive out longing with laughter. Blue spotlights set his body awash in blue stars that become blindingly hot pink when he starts to solo. After this tour, they can find a new singer, because I need to be where he is, need to be free to fall at his feet as he performs musical alchemy, wringing bright notes from his instrument. I play thrumming, rhythmic bass notes as he throws his head back in one of those orgasmic faces he likes to make. I’d do anything to get him to make them for me.

  
He stands with his legs spread, facing me, calling me out, and I laugh and answer in kind. I want to wrestle with him, wrap my body in his. The best I can do is help him craft the song that wraps around both of us. Forcing myself not to lose control, not to feel anything I shouldn’t, I hurry towards him and perform a perfunctory centerstage rock-out, but I can’t meet his eyes and I run back toward the haven of my lyrics. The world goes rainbow all around us; too many lights are flashing and I’m giving everything I have to almost the last song. A quick glance over my shoulder shows that Alex is singing to Neil, making him smile. I go to join him in the golden light and let myself get to close, mouth open, almost baiting him. I should blush at my behavior but I just hop backward, holding his eyes. Let him see.

  
My risk is rewarded when he lifts his hands off the strings – such a rare thing – to playfully fluff my hair, huge hand resting on my cheek. Could he…? I laugh at myself for even wondering. It isn’t possible, but after this I’m at least going to let him know. This might be the truest piece of Rush documentary… after this video, there might not be a band. Rocking, splay-legged, we bow toward each other and I cry out a truth that he won’t be able to hear as the crowd roars their appreciation. “I love you!”


	8. Chapter 8: Medley and Mayhem

Track Eight: Medley and Mayhem

He struts and spins, my eyes travelling the length of his long legs and I smile. I love By-Tor. It gives me a chance to be silly, to make wild eyes at the crowd, to let my bass growl out, menace. After the lyrics “sign of Eth…”I can see that my best friend and heart’s desire wants to jump and dance. The spotlights seem to materialize around him as if they belong to him and I can’t make my eyes look anywhere else. I almost giggle. I’ve never been in the audience for a Rush concert before, but I feel like I am tonight. After tonight, tapes like this that make me an audience member might be all that I have left for forever. A lump rises in my throat and I have to play it off by adding lyrics of my own: “oh, let it begin!”

  
He’s all over the place, the blue lights outlining his hair even as he glows red in all that blue. He’s dancing like a maniac and I even see the silly suspenders under his suit jacket when his antics make it fly wide. Neil’s cymbal work makes a shimmery background to his whirling form and I’m tempted to abandon my microphone and chase him off into the fantasyland of the underworld, my bass for a sword.

  
Instead, I answer all of his guitar work and want to rip his zipper down with my teeth. I’m sweating, playing my heart out, and wishing with everything I have that the show would just end. I need to be done with this, to let it go, to lose everything if I have to. But if I’m going to lose, I have one last pleasure to take, joining him again in the center of the stage. God bless progressive rock and its overblown instrumentality; moments without lyrics let me stand with him.  
Or, this time, with my back to him. I don’t think it will work, but I’m fired up and feeling wired with sound and just once I want to know what it feels like to be like him – to be admired and wanted and secure in coolness and beauty and talent. I don’t know how to manufacture the emotions, but the motions I know. I’ve been watching him for years and I’ve memorized his moves. Back to my best friend, I spin like one of the vinyls we wore out in our teens, bend and sway and buck as if I was making love to him standing up. I can almost feel his mouth come open; he’s never seen me like this. I should feel ashamed. This is on film! There should be blood in my cheeks, or pounding in my ears. But there’s just the truth of his beauty and my own wild response to it. I crane my head back and catch his eyes. _Baby, this one’s for you._

  
Flabbergasted or not, he’s still Rush’s premier performer and he plays the finger-poke-game-thingy with me as we end “By-Tor.” Each touch sends electricity searing through my fingertip (yeah, pathetic, I know… all it takes these days is a finger). My body lights up from his nearness and I know that my eyes have lost all their color. I’m so damned turned on that my pants are starting to hurt. Why the fuck did we make this thing a medley?

  
Oh, Christ.

  
As “In the Mood” begins, he strides out into blue and golden light and his flaxen hair flashes as it flies past his face. I don’t believe in any life after this one, but if there is one – I hope I can customize my angels and make them look just like that.

  
The lights change again, house lights going up to mingle with pink and gold and he comes to stand right beside me. He messes with me all the time like this… but this time there’s no silly face, no playful motion of his hands on the strings. And for a moment I swear he’s checking out my ass. “You just do it better,” I sing, goofing the line, thinking that he could do me any way he wanted to. And then he’s looking right into my eyes – right into me – and I swear that he’s soundlessly saying everything I ever wanted to hear. He holds my eyes and won’t let go, makes everything sink in. When it has, he gives me that boyish smile that always melts everything in me and then dashes away, running backward as if his guitar is a string that’s been pulled and is now being reeled in.  
“It’s got to be!” I declare, looking away, looking for him. I’m singing my own anthem, singing myself into courage.

… speaking of anthems…  
The lights go white as stars and flash, rainbows dancing across the stage. He starts to jump up and down and I almost fall down into laughter. I can’t think of a better ending than this! Maybe this solid classic, this crowd-pleaser can help me move from singing to saying the words to him. I make it through the goofy lyrics while he goes to make love to the crowd. Watching him, I shake my head at his stupid red shoes. If he ever does get to be mine, I’m throwing those out. From shoe-less feet my mind moves up his body and I decide that he really doesn’t need any of that luggage he’s been hauling about. Clothes are a sin on a body like that. Then he’s spread legged again, launching us into 2112. A brave new world. A future filled with adventure. Maybe what I need is a time machine…

  
He’s down on one knee when I run up to dance with him and my shaking body makes him get up, turn to me. This is it, then. I know I can make him hear me. We’ve joked together for years onstage. Now to just find the right words. My head is resting on his shoulder; I can smell his hair, feel the heat of him. The cameras are pointed right at us and he’s flapping his lips in a silly parody of the notes we’re playing. But he’s not making the usual sound; he’s telling me something.

  
“You’re so fucking sexy tonight,” he says, almost in sing-song and I burn and flush and imagine it a joke in the seconds before he continues. He leans in close, nuzzles into my hair to speak right into my ear. The sound of his voice vibrates my whole being. “Tell me I’m not wrong, Dirk. Tell me that you’ve been trying to turn me on.” I shiver, wonder if I’m even still playing my bass. He moans and I swell. I want to take his hand off of that damn guitar and put it on me. “I want to fuck you.”

  
And then he’s out there again, ending the song as I spin around and around in a haze of lust and music. At some point I end up facing Neil, playing and backing away. He’s giving me a look I don’t understand and I think that he knows somehow, even back there in the world of his drums. Then he holds one of the drum sticks to his forehead. A salute? What in the hell is happening?

  
The red star of Rushdom goes up and the lights go down and I think I would just pass out on the stage if it wasn’t for Alex – ghost pale in the dark – his long, strong fingers coming around my waist. Halfway to the dressing room he slips them down, brushing them over me, making me rise. I blink at him, still dazed. “So it worked?”Music ringing in me, I know I’ve pitched my voice lower than usual; his laughter rocks me back, breaks up the silence.

  
We’re in the dressing room now, door locked – his work! – and he smiles. “You mean your little stage routine? Yeah, it worked. You bundled up most of my fantasies into an hour long set.”

  
He has fantasies? About me? I don’t know how to answer that so I blurt out the secret I’ve waited my entire life to tell. “I love you.”

  
His blue and golden eyes dance. “Yeah, I got that.”

  
Though his voice is as gentle as summertime, I find myself blushing. I never thought I’d get to this moment and it’s hard to keep my head. “I… I just wanted you to know. It’s not just sex. Not for me.” The moment after the words are out, I wish I could be less myself and much more someone else entirely. We haven’t even kissed and here I am laying out conditions!

  
He must see it all – my regrets, my wrecked mental state – because he steps closer and ruffles my hair just the way he did onstage. “You think I don’t know you well enough to know better, Dirk? I know you aren’t a one night stand kind of guy.”

  
I blush again, lower my eyes. “I thought you knew that I wasn’t a guy kind of guy, either,” I mumble.

  
He slides those magic making fingers of his along the line of my cheek, my jaw. I don’t even feel him draw my face up, but his eyes are looking into mine – soft and fond. “Not just any guy,” he points out.

  
“Hard to argue with that.”

  
“Ged, if I tell you that I love you, that I’ve always loved you, will that help?”

  
I want to flirt with him, to say it would be a start – and I want to fall to my knees and wrap myself around him. He’s always been able to read me but I didn’t know his skills were so broad as to tell when I’ve been deprived of gravity. Slipping his huge hands around my waist, he backs me up until I’m sitting on a faded and lumpy excuse for a couch. I expect him to sit with me, but he hits his knees and nuzzles his golden head against my lap. I can feel the warmth of him through the denim.

  
“In my head, this ended with me being all alone,” I murmur, thinking aloud.

  
“Never again,” he promises, stroking my clasped hand as his free hand casually slips over my thighs, fingers pointed inside. The way his voice sounds – so sure – I can even believe it.

  
I’m not sure what I should do. I want to kiss him. I want to do more than that, even. But I’m dazed and weary with performing, too overloaded to take that next step, too fragile in the face of the great gift of my best friend. “Ali…”

  
He chuckles into my knees. “I love when you call me that. Nothing else in the whole world sounds like you, Ged.”

  
I know I’m shaking; if he keeps being so very sweet, I know I’ll burst into happy tears. “I’d like to play it cooler than this,” I begin, knowing he can hear the mingled tears and laughter in my voice, knowing he can see everything, down into my soul, even into my memories, those nights I’ve spent wanting him. “But I don’t know what to do with you!” I finally manage to reach out, to touch the warmth of his face, to feel the reality of him under my fingers. It’s magic. Like touching sunlight.

  
_Aleksandar, you’re my every wish._

  
“You did all the stage work,” he says, giving me a crooked grin that I want to kiss right off of his mouth. “So maybe it’s my turn, huh?” His fingers slip over my back pockets, thread themselves in my belt loops, make me shiver. “At least until we get back to the hotel, anyway.”

  
I don’t say a word as strokes over the small of my back, over my fluttering stomach. His eyes darken at my shivering and I realize that he’s going to be just as generous a lover as he is a friend – he’s turned on by turning me on! The first time I feel his lips, they aren’t pressed to my mouth, but to my palm. Hands on the peaks of my hips, fingers lying warm in the valley between them, he sends desire ripple-shimmering through me without a single touch. Making cat-contented noises, he makes love to my hands with his mouth, kissing each knuckle, tracing life line and love line with a pink tongue tip. I tense with desire, needing him to grasp me, to enter me, to push his weeping need past my lips. “Ali!”

  
He lifts his head and bats his eyes, being Lerxstish. “Now I did peg you for someone who’d be into foreplay,” he teases.

  
“What the hell do you think the last twelve years have been?” I cry, exasperated.

  
He laughs, liking that he can get me to be so shameless, to admit to so much need.


	9. Chapter 9: The Grand Finale

The Grand Finale

And he does just what he promised, taking control and kissing me down into the couch, straddling me with his silly red shoes still on his feet. I giggle at the thought of him pounding into me still wearing those shoes and he follows my eyes, rolls his own, and kicks them off. “You’re so mean to my shoes,” he scolds, but it doesn’t stop him from kissing down my throat, my stomach, undressing me and undressing himself and tangling us both together. Lying in his arms, I smile to feel him rub his feet against mine – warming them – to feel him press soft kisses to my hair. I turn my head to meet his mouth with mine. He moans as I deepen the first kiss, recognizing the green light he’s been given. His tongue prods at my lips, pushes past them, plays along the roof of my mouth. It tickles and makes me dizzy at once, to say nothing of his sweet, hard cock pressing into my hip. I wish he was pressing into something else!

  
“You’re awfully eager,” he teases, sounding like sin and sunshine.

  
I just keep squirming under him, letting him feel of much as me as I can feel of him until he finally pops his fingers into his mouth, dampens them with his pink tongue. I’m breathing too hard as he teases me, stroking me with one hand while his wet fingers trace circles around my trembling opening. The sweet way he’s teasing almost hurts. I whine and whimper into his mouth, making desperate sounds that would embarrass me if I didn’t want him so damn much. “Ali!”

  
He just laughs into the side of my neck as he drives a finger into me. I scream my head off, hitting a higher octave when he adds a second one. “You really want this, don’t you? You want me to fuck you.” The last is practically a whisper. He sounds stunned.

  
I’d laugh if I had air enough in my lungs for laughing. How can he be surprised that I’d want him? How can the sound of wonder have any place in his words? I’ve never talked dirty in my life, but if he needs me to be explicit…  
“I need you,” I pant out, words timed to the way he’s thrusting into me. It’s a different kind of music, what we’re creating here on this dressing room couch with the show still singing in my ears like the sound of a receding tide, but we still have a rhythm, a melody, a harmony that transcends both of our abilities. “I want you so deep inside of me. I want to feel you coming. I want you to fuck me, to take me hard, to get me there.”

  
With every word he jerks against me, his thick sex leaking. Teeth gritted, he manages to force a few words past his lips. “I don’t want to hurt you…”

  
I grab his hips, pull him tight against me. “Hurt me. I don’t care.”

  
His strong fingers dig into my shoulders and I find myself hoping they leave marks. I want proof of this. Bracing himself, he pushes inside – one swift, sharp movement that’s like being pleasantly stabbed to death. Warmth spreads through me as he starts to thrust, spiraling out in sparking circles of light and heat. My chest begins to heave as he moans above me. Loving every sound he makes, I squeeze myself around him. But Alex always gives as good as he gets. As I do my best to wring an orgasm out of him, he changes angles and begins to thrust harder and harder, “…gorgeous,” he moans, holding me to him as he starts to shake and spill. “You’resofuckinggeorgeous…”

  
He’s halfway gone when he finds that spot inside of me, but it doesn’t stop him from hammering into me even as he comes. I clench around him, gasping, dazed, and still find it in myself to hope I haven’t made him too much of a mess. I must look like a mess – anyway – because he’s shaking me, asking me if I’m okay.

  
I pull him down for a kiss as he grows soft inside of me. “I love you, Ali. That’s what I was saying up there on that stage all night.” I brush a loving hand over his face. “I’m so glad you could hear me.”

  
He rubs his nose into mine – an absurd, childish gesture that still manages to touch my heart. He’s like a great golden cat, all affection and purr. “When you’re around, Dirk, I don’t hear anything else. You’re the only music I want.”

  
Of course, this won’t stop us from throwing a tape in tonight as we lay in bed together between sessions – a concession to our scandalized drummer who congratulates us but very much wishes we’ll keep our nocturnal music making to ourselves. I’m just glad that we kept the greatest part of them off the tape.

 

For now…


End file.
